40 THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020
he said in an interview for an N.I.H.
oral history. “I think that speaks for
sound scientific and clinical observa-
tion.” The politics of seeking a cure,
though, would be far harder to manage.
O
n October 11, 1988, more than a
thousand AIDS activists gathered
outside the headquarters of the Food and
Drug Administration, in Rockville, Mary-
land, to protest the agency’s glacial reac-
tion to the epidemic. The activists knew
that their community needed new treat-
ments if they were to avoid catastrophe—
but they were stymied by the F.D.A.’s
drug-approval process, a remarkably in-
flexible system that typically took years.
That same day, another group of
protesters marched onto the campus of
the National Institutes of Health, in
Bethesda, Maryland. They were headed
for Building 31, the home of the Na-
tional Institute of Allergy and Infec-
tious Diseases. Fauci, who had become
the institute’s director in 1984, was now
the government’s leading scientist fo-
cussed on the AIDS epidemic. Even
though he was not running the F.D.A.,
he appeared almost daily in the media
to discuss the crisis. “My face was the
face of the federal government,” Fauci
told me. He was asked the same ques-
tion nearly every day: why wasn’t the
government moving faster? It didn’t help
that the Reagan Administration seemed
so indifferent to the plague.
Fauci watched from his office win-
dow as activists surrounded the building
and tried to scale its walls. Some were
dressed in black robes and carried scythes.
Many waved pink-and-black banners,
bearing the words “NIH Wake Up!” or
“Stop Killing Us!” All over campus, a
chant could be heard: “Fuck you, Fauci!”
“God, I hated him,” Larry Kramer,
the writer and activist who helped es-
tablish the two most important AIDS
advocacy groups in the country, the Gay
Men’s Health Crisis and Act Up, said.
“As far as I was concerned, he was the
central focus of evil in the world.” Kramer
attacked Fauci relentlessly in the media.
He called him an “incompetent idiot”
and a “pill-pushing” tool of the medical
establishment, insulted his wife, and even
compared him to Adolf Eichmann. In
1988, Kramer published a scathing open
letter. “Anthony Fauci, you are a mur-
In 1990, Fauci was the government’s leading researcher focussed on the AIDS epidemic.
derer,” he wrote. “Your refusal to hear
the screams of AIDS activists early in the
crisis resulted in the deaths of thousands
of Queers.”
As the epidemic spread and the death
toll rose, it was common for gay activ-
ists to view Fauci and NIAID with rage.
Fauci did not control the drug-approval
process, but he was seen as a barrier to
opening access to clinical trials, in which
volunteers could receive potentially life-
saving medications.
For most people infected with H.I.V.,
taking experimental drugs was the only
alternative to simply waiting for death.
Yet the F.D.A.’s arcane rules prevented
the vast majority of patients from qual-
ifying for trials. For instance, a signifi-
cant number of H.I.V. patients suffered
from pneumocystis pneumonia. The
condition—the same one observed in
the initial C.D.C. report—could be fatal,
so many who had it used an experimen-
tal antimicrobial medication called pent-
amidine, which had proved highly effec-
tive. But people who took experimental
medications were barred from partici-
pating in other clinical trials.
At first, Fauci held to the standard GEORGE TAMES / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX
